The Etruscan Connection

Kasai Ristorante

KASAI RISTORANTE

AMALFI COAST

It could have been better. It should have been better.

Not the food. The food was terrific. A label-less carafe of local red wine, a basket of fresh bread still hot from the oven, and a plate of steaming frutti di mare—fried catch of the day—literally “set the table.” The string of twinkling lights laced through the trellis overhead brought the stars in the heavens down to our table.

We were at Kasai, a restaurant perched on a ribbon of road in Praiano, a romantic and iconic little village on the Amalfi Coast. We sat at sidewalk tables overlooking the sea, but Kasai’s small dining room inside the establishment was across this narrow roadway and pressed into the rocky rise of the mountain above. The tables there were snuggled close together between vases of lavender and an unkempt display of ceramics on the walls in a dimly lit scene that could have been a paragraph or two from a long-lost Hemingway novel.

But the sidewalk tables were infinitely better, lined up at the railing overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in the cool evening air under a canopy of the sparkling night sky.

Waiters from the kitchen across the road showed no hesitation in dodging Vespas and tour buses careening around the curve to get to our table. The scent of fresh lemons—a staple of the Amalfi Coast—was in the air, and even the occasional squeal of tires as vehicles of all sizes rolled past in careless haste added to the operatic essence of the evening.

It was glorious.

But the call I got from Aggie earlier that afternoon could have been better.

“I need your help,” was all he said.

Normally, I would have hoped for more detail than that. Even a “hello” or a simple, “How are you, Darren?” But Aggie didn’t spin long sentences, for me or anyone else. Just “I need your help.”

Seated across from me at Kasai, Alana paused with her fork held over the plate of steaming seafood and looked up at me. Even in the dim glow of the party lights overhead, her brown eyes sparkled and brought a pleasant thump to my heart.

“Everything alright?” she asked.

“Yeah. It’s okay,” I lied. Alana and I were celebrating our final evening in Praiano before returning home—she to Vienna, Austria, and me to Washington, D.C. The blissfully limpid night, the fragrance of summer flowers, and the aromas of seafood and fresh bread on the table made parting even harder. We never seemed to have enough time together, which is why I planned this week for us at the Villa Poesia just down the road.

We worked through our plate of seafood and shared glasses of wine and humorous recollections of our week together. The fried calamari had a hint of red spice, and the red wine was a welcome chaser for the oil-scented dressing that dappled the plate of tiny fish and mussels.

But I was a little distracted, and Alana could tell.

The waiter swung in our direction once again—mere seconds before a minibus sped down the road—and settled a plate of truffled pasta between us. The broad tagliatelle noodles glistened with a coating of melted butter and olive oil, and the shaved, paper-thin discs of black truffle gave off a savory aroma that trailed behind the waiter and turned heads from other tables. I lifted my fork to load some of it onto my plate as Alana watched.

“Is your friend okay?” she asked, pressing her point.

Alana knew of Aggie but had not met him. Not during our time in Vienna and not since then. But she knew that he was a part of my complicated history. Officer Alana Weber was an Austrian police investigator, and she was quick to pick up on telltale signals in my behavior.

Aggie Darwin was an old friend. We met at a rural commune just hours from Washington, D.C., after our tours of duty in Afghanistan. Tall Cedars was a way station for battered souls. Returning from the war zone where I served as a military intelligence interrogator, I needed the uncomplicated, undulating rhythms of the Tall Cedars lifestyle, a veritable wind chime for a settled life. There, I encountered Aggie, who was there in search of the same therapy.

“He said he needs help,” I told Alana, turning the tagliatelle on my fork as I turned the conversation back to the phone call I got that afternoon. She and I had just risen from a pleasurable midday nap and moved lazily to the late-afternoon sunlight on the terrace when my cell phone had buzzed on the table beside me.

The terrace of the Villa Poesia—and the villa itself—offered numerous delights. Relaxing and sunburst in the afternoon, cooled with gentle Mediterranean breezes in the evening. The white-washed walls of the villa were brilliantly accented with ocean blue and green flourishes, a gorgeous palace on the edge of the coast. The vast terrazza provided privacy as well as views that seemed to stretch forever. Through long, languorous days and quiet evening hours, we sat there on the reclining lounges and gazed out at the endless sea.

“What kind of help?” she asked, bringing my attention back to Kasai, to Alana, and to the evening meal.

“He said a friend of his, a guy named Dielman or something, died in an archeological dig.”

“Where?”

“In Tarquinia,” I replied. “Don’t know where that is, except Aggie said it’s just north of Rome.”

“How did he, this guy Dielman, die?”

“Not sure. Aggie didn’t want to give too many details over the phone, but he was clearly in a bit of shock.”

“And you can help with this?” Alana pursued.

“Aggie thinks it wasn’t an accident.”

Alana lifted some of the tagliatelle and truffles with a combination of fork and serving spoon and lowered the bundle onto her plate.

“You’re not a bank examiner,” she said with a wry smile. I, too, had to smile at her obvious jab.

When Alana and I had first met in Vienna, I was posing as a bank examiner, reluctant to give away my true identity, while I sorted out a strange series of coincidences for the American president.

Well, sorta true identity. After claiming to be a bank examiner to justify my interest in the DFR-Wien bank that was central to the President’s concerns, I had to reset my bio to explain to her that I was actually a wine and food writer. True enough, since I had published articles for The Wine Review and was in Vienna at the time to attend a formal tasting of Italian wines. But when she doubted even that ruse, I realized that I wasn’t far from admitting my even truer background. Her piercing gaze convinced me that her natural abilities or police training made Alana adept at divining the truth in a forest of lies. She saw through my layers of deception. Fortunately, our evolving personal relationship made her reluctant to force me to reveal more.

So, at dinner, I didn’t have to reply to her comment. But I knew the time would come when I would have to tell her who I really was.

Darren Priest, my current name, served nicely as an adopted identity. As a writer, I could pass it off simply as a nom de plume. But I kept it for grander purposes, with a Social Security card in that name, tax records, and abundant other references—thanks to an assist from the U.S. government. I didn’t have to return to my birth name, Armando Listrani, unless I wanted to. And with Alana—at least for now—I didn’t want to.

And the U.S. government strongly agreed with that decision.

“Armando” might have been too much for Alana to handle at this point in our relationship. As him—or should I say, as the “really truly me”—I had worked in military intelligence, in a special squad used in the interrogation of particularly difficult subjects, from both sides of the conflict. Together with five other men who shared my odd ability to find truth amid a subject’s lies, I had carried out interrogations in secret, weeks or months at a time as circumstances required. I had been able to break down the subjects with mind games and psychological tricks. No physical contact or threats; no menacing comments about their own lives or that of their family members. Just psy-ops—and what Sergeant Randall called “penetrating perceptions of nonverbal signals.” Despite his penchant for obtuse verbiage, we got what Sarge was describing: the inexplicable talent for translating minor quirks, muscle twitches, dryness on the surface of the eyes, and skin temperature into signals that could be used against the subject and lead him to break down his defenses against the truth.

We didn’t attempt to find out the truth about the subject; the truth was less important than knowing the lies. We only cared to know when he was being misleading or deceitful. Simply by leaning in or staring blankly at him, I could convey my skepticism about what he was saying. This, and a series of carefully worded questions, led him to worry that I knew more than he did and more than he was admitting to. Which in turn led him to expose everything he was trying to hide.

A rising pink glow on his forearms, an inconspicuous bristle of his eyebrows, a gulp or a stare that seemed forcibly non-blinking always gave him away.

It was called Operation Best Guess, a unit that foreswore the Medieval torture practices favored by misguided goons with rubber hoses and water buckets. Word play and a keen awareness of physical “tells” allowed us to peel back the layers of untruths to discover the nuggets of worthwhile information.

It worked every time.

But after separating from the U.S. Army, I was warned by the government officials to whom I reported that continuing as Armando Listrani might pose some difficulties that I would rather avoid. “You’ve been places that you should forget and dealt with people who won’t forget,” they told me. So, they offered help in abandoning that identity and assuming my new one, as Darren Priest.

That step was particularly hard on my family. With both mother and father deceased, I had only to break it to siblings. But they could only know that I was no longer Armando, not that I had become Darren Priest since they were not allowed to know where I had gone. I softened it a bit by maintaining regular communication, even occasional in-person visits, but generally had to divorce myself from my earlier life to remain safe.

Why safe? I had not committed any crimes while an interrogator. But I had spent too much time with too many people who wouldn’t mind getting revenge for the role I played in their capture and imprisonment.

Some parts of the world were especially dangerous for me, so the Department of State flatly refused to let me travel there, even as a civilian. Fortunately, the Amalfi Coast was not one of those places.

But once you adopt a new identity, you can’t keep changing it. I couldn’t be Armando Listrani while at the Villa Poesia in Praiano, then resume Darren Priest when I returned to Washington.

So, Alana knew me as Darren Priest, the wine and food writer whose “cover” career she only barely believed. She easily discarded my ruse of being a bank examiner in Vienna and, when she found out I had posed as a journalist for The Washington Post at another point in time, she scoffed. I was convincing to most people; I knew a lot about the identities I assumed and the subjects they embodied. As a wine and food writer, I had published numerous articles and a few books, but anyone with Alana’s perceptive skills—not to mention the emotional proximity I allowed her—would know that there lurked something else below the surface.

As the pistachio gelato and espresso appeared at the table, my mind went back to Alana’s comment.

“No, I’m not a bank examiner,” I smiled. I wanted to tell her more and knew that I would, in time, but not right now.

Alana smiled back and slipped a spoonful of gelato into her mouth.

“Aggie said he thinks Dielman’s death was not an accident,” I repeated.

“An archeological dig?” she asked with skepticism. “What kind of skullduggery goes on at those places?”

“Don’t know,” I replied. “And he’s a little jumpy now and then. Aggie, I mean. But this sounded different.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Well, the week at Villa Poesia ends tomorrow…” and this drew a sigh from Alana. It had been a spectacular escape for both of us. She from her duties as a police investigator; me from my double-life as a writer and as a too-often sought-after investigator for the American power center. In Praiano, and at Villa Poesia, we had forsaken all that, forgotten it all even. We had become Alana and Darren, lovers with only these infrequent getaways to remind us of our attraction to each other.

Work of the old kind had not intervened until Aggie’s call.

Alana would be returning home to Vienna anyway, to work, and to her young daughter Kia. And I was returning to my condo in the suburbs of Washington. Aggie’s call for help might create a detour for us, though, a delay in facing the real world again. So, I dipped my spoon into the gelato and turned my eyes toward Alana.

“Would you like to go to Tarquinia for a few days?” I asked.

“I would go to the Arctic with you,” she said quickly but added, “well, maybe not there,” and she smiled.

“But yes, I can spare a couple of days for that,” she added. “It’s only Friday, and I don’t report back to work until Monday. If we check out tomorrow and head north, we’ll have most of Saturday and all of Sunday. I can catch a train from Rome to Vienna on Monday morning.”

“Okay. Done,” I said with more confidence than I actually felt. Leaving the Amalfi Coast and heading toward Rome would not be as pleasant as days in the sun at Villa Poesia, but at least I’d still be with Alana.